It was 20 years ago today…
Yes, that Sgt. Pepper taught the band to play. But also the stock markets around the world went into free fall in the worst crash since 1929. I was there, working as a financial futures broker in the City of London. Starting on Black Monday - October 19, 1987 - indexes like the Dow Jones Industrial lost a third of their value over the following weeks.
But the reasons for the dramatic sell off were not particularly rational - in fact within 2 years the markets were back to where they had been before the crash - there was a ‘group think’ going on by the institutional investors that turned a market correction into a blind panic. They were all using computer programs based upon a set of almost identical assumptions to help them decide how to buy and sell stocks, so when certain prices were breached massive numbers of sell orders were triggered at the same time. As the market started to drop, more and more sell orders were automatically triggered and it became a self-fulfilling prophecy: sell the market because the market is going down.
The group think I saw 20 years ago is happening now in marketing. The mentality is to do something because that’s what others are doing, without thinking through the assumptions and to stop and ask ‘why?’ And, you know what, we’re starting to see the effects. The ‘business as usual’ crowd are losing out to the marketers and agencies who are questioning the assumptions about the role marketing plays in consumers’ lives and can find ways to do things in a fresher way.
As we say in the Punk Marketing Manifesto, “why not ask ‘why not?’” Assumptions are there to be questioned, not followed without thinking. As the money moves from the old ways of marketing to the new the need for change has never been clearer.
